Software Development

One of the main objective of the Institute is to disseminate the knowledge of Hydrology for the benefit of both field engineers and academic organisations. Under the research programme, Institute has also taken up the work of software development.

Analysis of hydrological data as well as flood estimation form the basis of most of the hydrological studies. For a field engineer having limited knowledge of computer it becomes sometimes difficult to use the available methodology available in the form of computer programmes. Keeping in view this need, some interactive software packages have been developed by National Institute of Hydrology, for Unit Hydrograph derivation, flood estimation, reservoir and channel routing and reservoir operation.

These software are available along with a User's Manual covering various relevant details. Practicing Engineers and Scientists as well as R&D, Field and academic organisations will find these packages of immense use in the flood estimation for various hydraulic structures and similar other uses.

Unit Hydrograph Applications for Flood Estimation

• Simulation of Reservoir Operations
• Flood Estimation Using Deterministic Approach

These packages and their capabilities are described in brief as under:

UHPACKI (Unit Hydrograph Applications for Flood Estimation Package)

Flood estimation is one of the most important components of water resources project planning, design and operation. Unit hydrograph approach is a simple, versatile and popular technique which is being widely used for the estimation of floods for design of hydraulic structures, drainage system, small bridges, culverts etc.

This software package is developed to carry out unit hydrograph analysis for the estimation of flood for gauged as well as ungauged catchments of small and medium size. It is an interactive software having many options for carrying out the various computations involved in unit hydrograph analysis. These options are considered to be in six main categories leading to various sub categories for different options.

One of the main feature of the package is availability of online help on any option selected at any stage. Provision is also made for creating, editing, viewing, deleting, renaming or plotting of a file. For the options where it is appropriate to create a plot file, it is created and its name is displayed during the execution of the programme. It can be viewed under the plot option of the package.

FLPACK(Flood Estimation for Large Catchments Using Deterministic Approach Package)

Flood estimation is one of the most important components of water resources project planning, design and operation. Unit Hydrograph theory may be used to estimate the flood for the small catchments up to the size of 5000 Sq. Km. with reasonably accuracy. However for the catchments having area more than 5000 Sq. Km., the principles of Unit Hydrograph cannot be applied considering catchment as a single unit. A network model may then be developed wherein the flood hydrograph is computed for each sub catchment and the combined contributions from each sub catchments are routed through the respective river reaches using an appropriate flood routing technique to estimate the flood for the large size catchment.

This interactive software package incorporates the above aspects through options for various methods of flood routing and Unit Hydrograph derivation. Also, the options for calibration of Unit Hydrograph parameters for the various sub catchments and for calibration of routing parameters for different river reaches from the historical records are provided in the package. A user manual describes in brief methodologies adopted for various options and demonstrates the applications of the software package for the various options with the help of illustrative examples whose sample input and output are provided in the package.

One of the main feature of the package is availability of online help on any option selected at any stage. Provision is also made for creating, editing, viewing, deleting, renaming or plotting of a file. For the options where it is appropriate to create a plot file, it is created and its name is displayed during the execution of the programmed. It can be viewed under the plot option of the package.

NIH_ReSyP Package

A reservoir is an important component of a water resources development project. Principal function of a reservoir is to regulate the natural streamflow thereby, changing the temporal and spatial availability of water for beneficial purposes such as municipal and industrial water supply, irrigation, hydropower generation, and navigation.

Reservoirs are commonly built in India for conservation and flood control purposes. Because of the high time and space variability of rainfall, reservoirs play very important role in the planning and management of water resources. More than 3000 major and medium dams have already been completed. Thus, a need was felt to develop a comprehensive software for Reservoir Analysis.

Capabilities

The software will be useful for various analyses related to design and management of reservoirs. It can be used for the following tasks:

• To compute reservoir capacity using Sequent Peak algorithm.
• To interpolate Elevation-Area-Capacity table for any elevation interval.
• To determine the firm power from a reservoir or to simulate the operation of a hydropower project.
• To simulate the operation of a multi-purpose multireservoir system for conservation purposes.
• To carry out flow routing through a reservoir using the hydrologic routing methods.
• To determine the reservoir operation policy using Stretched Thread method.
• To determine the rule curve levels using mass balance approach.
• To determine the required reservoir storage for a given yield or vice versa.

In addition to the analysis, the software includes graphical facilities also. After carrying out the analysis for a particular module, the software prompts whether a graphical display of the results is desired. Positive response produces on-screen graphs of the analysis.Please click here to download NIH_ReSyP Package